Judy Engblom, better known to readers of The Pond as "Momzerduck", passed away at 918am on Sunday, September 20th.

The doctors had stayed encouraged regarding a liver transplant on Saturday.  Everything was progressing as they expected, though the dialysis that day hadn't pulled out as much fluid as they had hoped.  It wasn't a problem, per se, just added another day or two to the wait for being put on The List.

I had spent the entire day with her in the ICU ward, then Ph.Duck and I went back to his apartment to get some sleep.  We got there around 1030pm, and fell asleep almost immediately thereafter.

At 1130pm, we got a phone call from the ICU, asking us to come back immediately.  When we got there, we found her room filled with doctors and nurses, all of whom were moving quickly and talking in clipped, professional tones.  Two of the doctors took us into a conference room to explain what had happened.

When the nurses began to turn her (so as to prevent bedsores), her heart went into Ventricular Tachycardia, which was very much like what I had during The Cardiac Incident, except that where my heart sped up to about 250bpm, hers had stopped beating and started quivering uncontrollably.  They shocked her with the paddles, which did regain a pulse.  Just a minute or so later, however, her heart stopped again.  This time, shocking her didn't help, so they began chest compression and various drugs.  After 10 minutes or so of this, her heart restarted.

When we asked the doctors what this would do to her chances for a liver transplant, they replied frankly and honestly: "We won't know for sure until the Liver team comes in, but it probably will prevent her from being considered a viable candidate."

When the Liver team leader confirmed that, we made the decision to withdraw life support, for that was, in fact, what she was on at this time.  She had been essentially comatose for the previous three days as a result of an encephalopathy attack, aided by some light sedation to prevent her from tearing at her feeding tube and the ventilation hose (she had managed to remove the feeding tube during the onset of the encephalopathy). 

Unfortunately, during the resuscitation attempts, they had to withdraw the sedation, as it would interfere with bringing up her blood pressure to minimum levels... and it was obvious during the time she was without it that she was in some serious discomfort from the hoses, needles and wires.  As this was all being done to get her to a new liver, which now was never going to arrive, we knew that she wouldn't... didn't... want to suffer any more.

The ventilation hose and the final drugs were removed at 915am.  At 918am on Sunday morning, September 20th, 2009, the woman that I was honored to call my mother, Judy Engblom, Momzerduck, passed away. 

She was so much more than I deserved.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 09:43 PM | Comments (37) | Add Comment
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